"Punctuality (better yet, being early)
… and Following Through — Two Very Important Personal
Qualities”

Here’s a real-life story about
life lessons that one of our FISH learned well. Thanks to the
Emanuel Family for sharing with us.

Help Yourself; Be Early Not Just on Time

This fall Katherine Emanuel, former FISH swimmer
and 2016 Washington Lee High School graduate, had an opportunity to
compete for one of four Air Force Academy slots to participate in
the 2018 Tri-Academies Viet Nam and Cambodia trip. The trip
is a three week long all-expense paid cultural immersion experience
with each service academy selecting four students to
participate. Selection for one of the four AF Academy slots
was based on class rank, an essay, and an interview with the
political science professor leading the AF
contingent.

Katherine was confident that she could do well on
the class rank assessment since she is in the top tier of the class
of 2020 and could write a decent essay. Doing well on the
interview she felt was critical because as an electrical
engineering major it was unclear to her how much preference (if
any) was given to political science majors. She also
recognized that at this point in her academic career she was an
unknown to the political science department. Katherine showed
up 15 minutes early for the interview. Her timing paid off.
The professor started the interview early, and she learned that she
was going to be competitive for a slot because she was early.
It turns out that the professor leading the trip values
punctuality. He wants to be able to count on the cadets to
show up early each day of the 21-day trip so that they don’t
miss travel connections or give a bad impression to their host
country sponsors.

In late January Katherine was notified that she
had been selected for one of the four trip slots out of over a
hundred plus candidates. She was immediately given a
checklist of pre-trip requirements to include applying for a
military passport, renewing a tourist passport if expiring, and
getting additional immunizations if necessary to be medically
cleared for travel. What Katherine didn’t realize was
that the evaluation process was still on-going. Recently, she
was notified that one cadet selected for the trip had been
downgraded to an alternate for not progressing on the pre-trip
checklist.